The third piece in our series of commissions from sex workers is a video and accompanying essay by Lena Chen, asking questions of authenticity and exploring her identity as an Asian woman in the diaspora.
Chinese Touch (2023), Lena Chen
Single-Channel Video
“What’ll we get for ten dollars?”
“Every ‘ting you want”
“Everything?”
“Every ‘ting”
As an Asian woman in the diaspora, what is the value of authenticity when I find pleasure in what I know to be fake, caricature, and problematic? Chinese Touch began as an attempt to render a familiar pornographic act – the facial or the cumshot – strange and disturbing. By looping footage of the moments preceding ejaculation, the work disrupts the linear narrative of sexual release and centers the faces of Asian actresses with their mouths agape, continually waiting and wanting. The male co-performers’ bodies are edited out of the frame, leaving us to ponder who these Asian women are in the absence of a phallus. What does it mean to only exist as fantasy? Who am I if not seen or desired by you?
Chinese Touch appropriates scenes from pornography freely accessed on video streaming sites and segments from the cooking show “Joyce Chen Cooks,” which ran from 1966 to 1967 on WGBH and whose titular host was a chef, restaurateur, and entrepreneur credited with popularizing Chinese food in America. Joyce Chen, who worked with voice coaches and rehearsed relentlessly to prepare for filming, was the first woman of color to host her own nationally-syndicated cooking show. Utilizing the exact same set as Julia Child’s “The French Chef,” the show elevated Chinese cuisine from its lowbrow reputation by making it palatable and accessible to white audiences.
The single-channel video is accompanied by a soundtrack that remixes audio from “Joyce Chen Cooks” with 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny” (1989), a song considered so explicit that it resulted in the rap group being prosecuted for obscenity. The 2 Live Crew track samples from a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket in which a Vietnamese prostitute (played by Papillon Soo Soo) solicits two American GIs. Soo Soo’s lines, “Me so horny. Me love you long time.” are perhaps the most famous words spoken by an Asian woman in Western cinema, cementing the depiction of Asian female hypersexuality in the popular consciousness.
I juxtapose Chen – emblematic of the model minority and the domestic goddess – alongside porn actresses – who represent the sexual insatiability of the racial other – to draw attention to questions of agency, (self-)objectification, and authenticity. These are not actresses in Asian pornographic productions made for Asian audiences but rather, Asian actresses in American productions who are performing for American audiences (often made up of white men searching for porn that features women of specific races). Chen, too, performs for a white public, and opens her show with an orientalist sequence of tinkling wind chimes. Rather than simply dismissing stereotypical representations as offensive, film scholar Celine Shimizu Parreñas contends that we ought to examine the agency and pleasure of the Asian bodies that take part in or view these representations (including both those that perform and spectate). Her concept of “the bind of representation” refers to how acting becomes a confrontation with the very stereotypes that surround Asian American sexuality. By reframing the “hypersexual representation as a dialectical encounter among multiple subjects,” Shimizu restores agency to the Asian female subject who is empowered to act and not merely to be acted upon, even if such agency involves deriving pleasure from “problematic” images.
By now, you might suspect that I’m one of those Asian women who enjoys eating orange chicken and roleplaying sexual submission with white men. And it’s true – I like it even though it’s politically incorrect … and precisely because it is politically incorrect. Panda Express and pornography are both enjoyable during the act of consumption; the yucky feelings of guilt and indigestion only set in later. And even then, I find myself returning to the habit, despite the complicated emotions that arise in the act of encountering a caricature that purports to represent who I am. In Chinese Touch, I am less interested in critiquing Western hegemony and cultural assimilation than I am in confronting the taboo desire to consume (the cum of white men) and to be consumed (by white men as an image). While the resulting video seemingly equates White imperial sexual conquest with the appropriation of Asian cuisine, by depicting Asian women laboriously performing for white audiences who perpetually perceive them as foreign, I also cannot deny the pleasure within such a performance, the pleasure of being forever exotic and unknowable, the pleasure of striving for an authenticity which can never be attained, and the pleasure in the powerful act of enrapturing the very people who will never quite comprehend who you are, even if they learn how to replicate your recipes.